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Modern Backlash Against Feminism?

"Those little feminist-baiting scamps are well-known for their lax grasp of the term sexual consent, not to mention their constant assertions that all women are "wenches" and "slags". Despite apparent displays of contrition following outrage at their description of rape as "surprise sex", the latent misogyny continues unheeded. The outfit boasts 415,000 Facebook likes and has just launched an online TV channel and a student dating website called Shag@Uni, which claims to have 50,000 members and boasts the tagline "Girls need to be"

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Laddishness has nothing to do with feminism, and isn't a backlash to anything except growing up and being an adult. It has been an attitude in the UK among older adolescents since the 19th Century Spivs, Rockers, Mods, Punks are all varieties of the same thing. So is Football Hooliganism.

And it's mostly talk. The only people they want to impress are their male peers, or failing that, themselves.

introducing the topic of Feminism. I turned the idea right side up by disagreeing with the view and putting the behaviour in its context, but I can understand how having turned yourself upside down and then being righted is disorienting. Just don't blame me for your dizziness, you did that to yourself.

Re-read the Guardian article and find me a mention of Feminism as that term is normally understood by literate people.

FYI There was a big controversy in the British press (as opposed to the real world) some time ago about Female Laddishness. The generally lower Middle Class and Lower class phenomenon of girls going out weekly, drinking, vandalizing, peeing in public, fighting, and screwing almost anyone, just as if they were men.

Please note that the idiot magazine we're talking about is directed at University aged males a significant percentage (34%) who went to Private i.e Expensive Schools in Britain. It is an youthful upper-class directed Playboy-like magazine, not one of intellectual expression or social argument.

reply to it reading backwards. Where did I indicate approval? I said it wasn't connected to Feminism. I think these guys are just the most recent a***holes in a long line of a***holes reacting against maturity, and nothing else.

But thank you for so clearly demonstrating my point about your disorientation.

You are the one making the unfounded assertion that teenage hooliganism is a reaction to feminism using an article in the Guardian which makes no such assertion. The connection of these Upper Class yobbo's to feminism is all your own it is entirely unmentioned in the article you use to prove your assertion.

"[Uni Lads'] constant quest for 'gash' has less to do with sex for its own sake, and more to do with reporting back to the LADpack afterwards." The word "pack" is appropriate - these young men are banding together for the hunt, revelling in their bravado and their ability to shock." It isn't a reaction to Feminism, it is pack behaviour among young males.

So substantiate the charge that this is a reaction to Feminism, or back off and apologize to the SE Forum for letting your own misogyny and strange thought patterns create another entirely fictitious post from the Planet Denison.

daily lives of those of us who don't participate. It's anti-social media as far as I'm concerned, and has added a whole new dimension to the growing amorality in our world. If you're old enough to recall an old song from the hippy days by Barry McGuire called "Eve of Destruction", you'll remember it referring to fear of all out nuclear war. Perhaps the title still fits but the type of damage expected has dramatically changed.

to make money. Was Sonny Bono ever a hippie? Nah, he just wanted to make milllions in the Music Business and provided content and production and bad vocals.

Barry McGuire started out as part of the "Folk" explosion as a member of The Rooftop Singers "Green, Green, (as green they say...)" a group manufactured by a record company to cash in on the "Folk" boom. Glen Campbell played 12 string on the same record. Is he a hippie? Somehow the only person who might possibly have qualified as a Hippie to play Las Vegas is George Carlin, and truthfully, he was too old to be a hippie.

And there is a difference between a musician and being in the Music Business, Ask Artie Shaw, or listen to him on the first Swing dvd of the Series Jazz.

But that is just a small quibble over an insubstantial figure.

Social media is for young people to think they have their own channel away from adult supervision. The magazine referred to was probably the creation of some young publishing exec to tap an advertising stream and advance his prospects with the old men running the company who are pandering to the demographic for profits. The reason things don't change over time "is that the old men have all the money, and a young man ain't got nuthin' in the world these days" because that's where the jobs are and emulation breeds promotion. The quotation incidentally is not from Messers Daltry, Townsend and Company, it is from the Mississippi-born American white jazz artist Mose Allison from the late 50's. I love Mose Allison. Saw him at Ronnie Scott's club in Soho, London, in 1998 and he was still as funny and sharp and musical as ever.

It is sort of the job of young people to be irritating, it is a process called individuation, and is necessary in ego formation. It usually occurs during the Terrible Two's, again around 4-5, and especially from about 9 to 18. Then they setlle down and become their parents all over again. It's all part of life's rich pageant.

Honestly, Steven, I'm not really in disagreement with your fundamental thought. I'm really trying to give it a larger context, and to encourage you to see that all is not going to hell in a handbasket, but is evolving as it should. Be hopeful, Steven. The world is just doing what it is supposed to do. Going round in circles. (No Billy Preston references please.)

and I'm not sure I could even tell you what the word meant. It was probably media contrived but I was referring to a period of time some would recognize as a dramatic change in youth culture such as, IMO, we are seeing with social media today. It's not all bad but quite open to abuse and anything that can be abused, will be abused. Social media is the new bully playground where the bully never gets a genuine black eye but his victims more often die without ever being punched by the bully.

While Hippie was a term used by those who wanted to be Hippies, and by the media, I never knew any one who called himself one. Girls self identified as Hippie Chicks, but not guys. Then again, that segment of society also split into the bell bottom brigade who were hedonists, and the straight leg jean, work-boot politicals and social activists who thought they were creating a new view of society. You can probably tell which of those I was, and I never used the word about myself or my friends, but did use it generically as a shorthand to describe people with a counter-culture viewpoint.

And I take your point that "Social Media" has been greatly abused by young people and has hurt many young people as well. I agree it does act like a megaphone amplifying what might be a small circulation rumour into a loud widespread lie, which persists even when the original lie is taken out of circulation.

How we stop thoughtless young people from being thoughtless young people is not a task I see any way to achieve, however. The classical liberal solution would be to put a programme in place to help those damaged by social media, but clearly that's impossible both organizationally and financially. And where the hell are the parents in the equation? Generally, thoughtless young people tend to be the offspring of thoughtless older people who don't set either a good expample or limits on their kid's behaviour. Nor do they, the parents, recognize their own failure. If it were pointed out to them, they'd just react with anger and denial. And so it goes (Kurt Vonnegut)

and perhaps came from "hep cat" such as what one might have called Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver) character on Dobie Gillis. Maynard, of course, was an exaggeration of the stereotype...that being a person who "dug" jazz but shunned anything related to work. Hippies were anything from idlers to bohemian but dug psychedelic music. Both hep cats and hippies developed their own language such as kids do today. I'm thinking that the term yuppie often referred to a one time hippie who'd abandoned that life to pursue one with "upward mobility". The term was also short for "young upwardly mobile professional" and had morphed from hippie to yippie and then to yuppie...or some such sequence. I really don't know. Just a poor kid from the midwest who grew up with B&W TV and had a crystal radio to listen to.

"Beatnik" as I was too young to understand what it meant when I first heard it. I'm now thinking the character of Maynard G. Krebs was more to stereotype that era of jazz,...maybe "bebop"... "beat" poetry, etc. A "beatnik" was to be recognized by certain types of chin whiskers and mannerisms. It seemed that some type of hair growth or style played a part in creating a cartoon caricature of any stereotype from beatnik to hippie and yuppie. I'd say that John Edwards was probably one of the most well known for sporting a yuppie hairdo.

Anyone who followed the comic strip "Beetle Bailey" got a taste of the evolution of youth culture from beatnik onward. Somehow Mort Walker (the creator) was able to introduce each of these into the military culture as well even though hair growth was strictly regulated in the armed services.